Theatre review: Ghosts, Giffnock
Ghosts - Eastwood Park Theatre, Giffnock
* * *
His great drama Ghosts, first published – and widely banned – in the early 1880’s, is a searing exposé in three acts of the misery caused by one wealthy man’s compulsive sexual promiscuity, by 19th- century society’s determination to collude with and conceal his crimes, and by his distraught wife’s ill-fated decision to go along with that concealment, even after his death. The consequences for Helen Alving are horrific, as she gradually faces the truth that her adored son is dying of the syphilis passed on by his father; and her final howl of horror, as she holds her dying son while society’s hypocrisy and judgment still rages around her, is one of the bleakest sounds in all drama.
The problem for many companies, though, is that they can’t resist the temptation to veil Ibsen’s radicalism in all the conventional trappings of polite costume drama, from gorgeous period clothes to strangely stilted texts. Anna Fox’s small-scale touring production for Sell A Door Theatre has a deft sense of pace and tension, and boasts an attractive central performance from Sarah Ogley as Mrs Alving. It suffers, though, from some stiff acting elsewhere, and a text full of the kind of “period” language that creates artificial barriers between modern audiences and classic plays. It has intense, moving moments, but in the end the production seems too stuffy and conventional to do justice to one of the bravest plays in the dramatic canon.